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Salmon Salad (Turn out a can of salmon)
Turn out a can of salmon; carefully remove all skin and bone, break into large flakes with a fork and mix with it a half cupful of boiled salad dressing. Let stand for an hour, arrange on a bed of lettuce leaves and garnish with hard boiled eggs; cut in eighths and strips of tiny pickled cucumbers.
A tinned-fish salad of the kind that filled cold suppers and picnic baskets once canned salmon became cheap. The only real work is in the dressing the recipe assumes you already have.
- The canA period can of salmon was usually one pound; modern cans run 6-7.5 oz, so use two, or a 14.75 oz can if you can find one. Traditional canned salmon includes skin and vertebrae, which is what the instruction to pick it over refers to. Fillet-style pouches skip that step entirely.
- Boiled salad dressingNot mayonnaise. Boiled dressing is a cooked custard of egg yolk, flour or cornstarch, vinegar, mustard, sugar and milk or cream, thickened in a double boiler and cooled — tangier and sharper than mayonnaise, with no raw egg. Any standard boiled-dressing recipe from the same era will do; mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of vinegar and a pinch of dry mustard is a passable substitute.
- Half a cupfulRoughly 120 ml, which is generous for two small cans. Start with a third and add more once the flakes are coated, or the salad slumps.
- Large flakesThe hinge of the dish. Salmon mashed with a fork turns to paste; lift and separate it in big pieces and stop as soon as the dressing has coated them.
- The hour's standingThis is to let the dressing penetrate, and it should happen in the refrigerator, not on the counter. Canned salmon is shelf-stable but the dressed salad is not.
- Tiny pickled cucumbersGherkins or cornichons, cut lengthwise into strips. Sweet pickles were also common in American books of this period; dill reads better against the boiled dressing.
- YieldNot stated in the original; a single period can would stretch to about four as a light main course, six to eight as a first course.
Canned salmon transformed the American cold table in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Canneries on the Columbia River and later throughout Puget Sound and Alaska shipped tinned fish east by rail at prices that put salmon on tables a thousand miles from any coast, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s answered with dozens of salmon loaves, croquettes and salads. What dates this recipe most precisely is the dressing: boiled dressing, cooked and cooled rather than emulsified raw, was the household standard before commercial mayonnaise became widely available in the 1910s, and it survived in home kitchens long afterward for its keeping qualities and its sharper, more vinegary edge. The arrangement — a bed of lettuce, hard-boiled eggs in eighths, pickle cut in strips — reflects the period's insistence that a salad be composed and garnished on the plate rather than tossed.